A Rubber Recycling Plant Employed 150 Unskilled and Relatively Low-Paid

question 64

Essay

A rubber recycling plant employed 150 unskilled and relatively low-paid production employees. Although employees were unhappy about their pay levels as well as noise and heat in the plant, most had high seniority because there were many other employment opportunities in the community. To motivate the workforce, the new plant manager decided to enrich the production jobs by giving
them a wider variety of tasks to perform and giving them more autonomy regarding when they performed those tasks. However, rather than increase job performance, the changes resulted in more complaints from employees, higher absenteeism due to stress and a slight increase in turnover.
Based on your knowledge of job design, explain why these results may have occurred.

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Definitions:

Delphi Technique

A method for gathering expert opinions and achieving consensus through a series of structured questionnaires, often used in forecasting and decision-making.

Specific Performance Objectives

Explicitly stated targets or goals that are intended to be achieved within a certain timeframe, often used to measure work performance.

Task Performance

Consists of the quantity and quality of work produced.

Delphi Technique

A structured communication method, usually involving surveys and questionnaires, used for systematic forecasting and decision-making by gaining consensus from a panel of experts.